I'm Stupid

I haven't posted to my blog since Christmas, when all the Clark Creek Dennis clan climbed into the car and headed up to Seattle for a day with the family. Thomas, or 'little disease vector' as we like to call him, brought along a few million friends and by the time we got home that night we were all sick. So instead of grandiose home improvement activity and amazing blog posts, the break mostly was spent on sniffles, hacks, and warm cups of tea.

Ever wondered who the makers of the "I'm with stoopid" teeshirts were referring to? Ponder no longer. Three years ago, we converted the dining room to a master bedroom and changed the attached laundry to the master bath. We hired a contractor to do the parts we didn't feel confident about, like building the frame for the tub and taping the drywall. We did quite a bit of the work ourselves and it was, in general, an empowering and rewarding experience - my first major home project.

There is a bracket around the edge of sewer pipe. It is designed so that you tuck the bolts that come with your toilet into the bracket, set the toilet down over the bolts and cinch it tight. There is a sort of inverted porcelain cone that you set on a ring of wax that sits over the pipe. The wax is supposed to squish out and fill in all the cracks when you cinch everything tight.

When I went to put my toilet together, one of the bolts kept falling down into the pipe bracket and after about 45 minutes of frustration I just doubled up one the wax rings and only bolted it down on the one side. Since then I've been aware, when alighting, that the throne was a wee bit wobbily. The other day, I went in there to find the thinnest trickle emanating from the base. My wax dam is crumbling. The half measure didn't make it by half. I now know what I'm doing this Saturday. Lesson learned.

posted by Scott in Washington at 6:10 PM |